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Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

rockylinux.org

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Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#61

Post by microtonal »

speakspokespok wrote: post #37
copperx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to confess that my early experiences with RedHat as a teenager and dealing with the nightmareish RPM dependencies soured me from the distribution. I went to Debian and then its many descendants and never looked back; APT seemed magical in comparison. I assume they have a package manager that resolves dependencies well now? Is that what an RPM wrangler is?

First impressions really matter. This is also why I went Debian. You shouldn't be getting marked down for saying it. Many of us were running on 28.8 dial-up. Internet search was not even close to a solved problem. Compiling a new kernel was an overnight or even weekend process. Finding and manually downloading rpm dependencies was slow and hard. Same era when compiling a kernel went overnight or over the weekend. You…

Compiling a new kernel was an overnight or even weekend process

One friend and I had a competition who could make the smallest kernel configuration still functional on their hardware. I remember that at some point we could build it in ten minutes or so. This was somewhere in the nineties, I was envious of his DX2-50.

Compare that to Debian's apt-get or Suse's yast/yast2 of the time, both just handled all that for you.

One of the really huge benefits of S.u.S.E. in Europe in the nineties was that you could buy it in nearly every book shop and it came with an installation/administration book and multiple CD-ROMs with pretty much all packages. Since many people did not have internet at all or at most dial-up, it gave you everything to have a complete system.

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#62

Post by znpy »

gerdesj wrote: post #10

I understand why people use RH and Rocky and even Oracle: the rpm wranglers. However its not for me. My earliest mainstream distro was RH when they did it just for fun (pre IBM) and then I slid slightly sideways towards Mandrake. I started off with Yggdrassil. I have to do jobs involving RH and co and its just a bit of a pain dealing with elderly stuff. Tomcat ... OK you can have one from 1863. There is a really good…

> I have to do jobs involving RH and co and its just a bit of a pain dealing with elderly stuff. Tomcat ... OK you can have one from 1863.

It's 2025, you can run whatever version you need in containers.

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#63

Post by znpy »

microtonal wrote: post #58
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tomcat ... OK you can have one from 1863. There is a really good security back port effort but why on earth start off with a kernel that is using a walking stick. Because old software is battle-tested and reliable. Moreover, upgrading software is ever a pain so it's best to minimize how often you have to do it. With a support policy of 10 years, you just can't beat RHEL (and derivatives) for stability.

Having had to use those kinds of machines often as a user, it is a total pain. For some reason, these enterprise distributions end up being used a lot on scientific and machine learning clusters. You have to deal with 5-10 year old bugs that are solved in every other distribution already and you have to jump through hoops to make modern software run. For me it always felt like the system administrators externalizing…

You can run whatever you want in containers. You don't even need root permissions. Red Hat's podman can launch containers without the need for root privileges.

> Despite my dislike of enterprise Linux, Red Hat is doing a lot of awesome work all around the stack. IMO Fedora and the immutable distros are the real showcase of all the things they do.

Fedora today is what RHEL will be tomorrow. They quite literally freeze a Fedora release to use as a base for RHEL's next release. If you like Fedora today you're gonna like Fedora tomorrow.

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#64

Post by znpy »

rubitxxx10 wrote: post #18
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tomcat ... OK you can have one from 1863. There is a really good security back port effort but why on earth start off with a kernel that is using a walking stick. Because old software is battle-tested and reliable. Moreover, upgrading software is ever a pain so it's best to minimize how often you have to do it. With a support policy of 10 years, you just can't beat RHEL (and derivatives) for stability.

I’m old. I used one of the original boxed RH distros. It was cool then. That was almost 30 years ago. I know they give back to Linux, and I’m thankful for the enterprises that pay for it because of that. It’s not a bad company, though it’s strange that you could be a great developer and lose your position there if your project gets cut, unless another team picks you up, from what I hear. But when Linus created Linux,…

> But when Linus created Linux, he didn’t do it for money, and RH just seems corporate to me like the Microsoft of Linux, way back before Microsoft had their own Linux. I want my Linux free-range not cooped.

You seem to forget that Red Hat has funded a lot of the development of the Linux ecosystem. There would be essentially no modern linux environment without Red Hat.

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#65

Post by znpy »

speakspokespok wrote: post #54
bigfatkitten wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rpm dependencies has been a solved problem with yum (and now dnf) for about two decades.

Yum was borrowed from yellow dog Linux.

Which in turn was based on RHEL/CentOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Dog_Linux

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#66

Post by microtonal »

speakspokespok wrote: post #54
bigfatkitten wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rpm dependencies has been a solved problem with yum (and now dnf) for about two decades.

Yum was borrowed from yellow dog Linux.

To be pedantic, yum was not from Yellow Dog, it is Yellow dog Updater Modified after all. It was a rewrite of the Yellow Dog Updater by people at Duke University. (Yellow Dog Linux was based on Red Hat.)

There was a lot of competition around package managers back then. For RPM, there were also urpmi, apt-rpm, etc.

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#67

Post by znpy »

worthless-trash wrote: post #39
gerdesj wrote: post #10

I understand why people use RH and Rocky and even Oracle: the rpm wranglers. However its not for me. My earliest mainstream distro was RH when they did it just for fun (pre IBM) and then I slid slightly sideways towards Mandrake. I started off with Yggdrassil. I have to do jobs involving RH and co and its just a bit of a pain dealing with elderly stuff. Tomcat ... OK you can have one from 1863. There is a really good…

Disclaimer: I'm very involved in the kernel part of this for $company. The RHEL kernels themselves do see many improvements over time, the code that you'll see when the product goes end of life is considerably updated compared to the original version string that you see in the package name / uname -a. There are customer and partner feature requests, cve fixes and general bug fixes that go in almost every day. The fir…

What if, more than a rolling kernel, we get a new kernel every two years or so?

Or maybe one in the middle of the (expected) lifetime of the major release ?

Just thinking out loud, but I acknowledge that maintaining a kernel version is no small task (probably takes a lot of engineering time)

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#68

Post by ChocolateGod »

Arnavion wrote: post #56
ChocolateGod wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so supporting them on Linux requires more effort than just writing up the DT. More effort then producing unique images for every board?

Yes. See https://github.com/aarch64-laptops/edk2/tree/dtbloader-app?t... for example.

It's a shame the DT approach encourages land fill of boards when the manufacturer stops providing updates.

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#69

Post by anticodon »

homebrewer wrote: post #60
copperx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to confess that my early experiences with RedHat as a teenager and dealing with the nightmareish RPM dependencies soured me from the distribution. I went to Debian and then its many descendants and never looked back; APT seemed magical in comparison. I assume they have a package manager that resolves dependencies well now? Is that what an RPM wrangler is?

This is a very outdated view. dnf runs circles around apt. Try it out, or at least find man pages on the ole 'net and see what it can do. Probably the thing I like the most is transactional installation (or upgrades/downgrades/removals) of packages with proper structured history of all package operations (not just a bunch of log records which you have to parse yourself), and the ability to revert any of those transac…

I had the same experience as the OP in the beginning of the century. I've built a lot of RPM packages back then and it was clear that system of dependencies built into RPM format itself (not apt or dnf, this is dpkg level in terms of Debian) was poorly thought out and clearly insufficient for any complex system.

I've also migrated to Debian and it felt like a huge step forward.

I'm on Arch now, BTW.

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#70

Post by rwmj »

publicmail wrote: post #23

Maybe a dumb question but how do non x86 boards normally boot Linux images in a generic way? When I was in the embedded space, our boards all relied on very specific device tree blobs. Is the same strategy used for these or does it use ACPI or something?

It's what the RISC-V Server TG is trying to standardize: https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-server-platform https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-announce/topic/public_review_...
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